Monday, July 20, 2009

Apparently my site host was having difficulties today and my site has been down resulting in a whole lot of broken image links in my stores. After spending a good chunk of the day transferring my images to Photobucket I managed to get a new design up for you.

Originally this skull and crossbones was hand drawn in ink but it just didn't seem right so I scanned it into Illustrator and redrew it there. This enabled me to easily duplicate it for a background using a custom made swatch out of my skull. It also gave me an easy way to reverse the image and perhaps at a later time add some color.

There are four current versions of the skull and crossbone availabe right now and tomorrow time permitting I am going to go back into Zazzle and seperate the different styles. Normally I like to do all versions by product so it is easy for you to compare but this time some ideas came in the middle of designing. I would have had the designs seperated right away but I had to spend that time on fixing broken links.

As of right now my site has the message "The Web site you are visiting is temporarily unavailable due to urgent maintenance work. If you have any questions regarding this Web site, please contact technical support" I can tell you in all honesty that it is not on my end and hopefully they get it up and running soon. The funny thing is that their main website is perfectly fine. I am however very sorry if it interfered with anything you were trying to see.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

While not a new design I somehow overlooked a wine tasting card for this design the first go around. I put it up early this morning while I was reposting the missing Cheshire Cats items.

Everything is in it's place now. I just have to tweak some descriptions in my store but for the most part I am happy with the way things are looking. I even think I am happy with the new 13 Black Cats Designs website.

I have a new skull and crossbones design in the wings that I may post tomorrow. I am not quite sure if I will post my ink drawing or turn it into a vector graphic yet. I hope you like it either way.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

I met Lora recently through an old friend from high school. I learned she was a fellow artist and we hit it off immediately. After a bit of persuasion I managed to get her to open up a store on Zazzle and I am glad she did. Although she is still starting she is managing to get a few items up now and they are beautiful. The above bag is a portrait of Mr Oliver J Cat, a friend of hers I am guessing and it happens to be one of my favorites (she keeps topping herself)

Cats are prevelant in her work but not exclusive. Her diner series is a long running series that Lora works on from time to time through the years. Her women are beautiful and depending on what you see can be wistful, sad, thoughtful or dreamy as I often see something different when I look at her work. There are bears, bunnies and cats in cowboy hats to be found here and I hope to see her "Galeen and Hobbes" series (I hope that is the correct name for them) soon.

I'd like you to take a look at her store and keep checking back as she adds more. You will find links to her Flickr site where you can see some of her pottery work and puppets, and main web page.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

For the past few days I have been having trouble with Blogger and the layout - well, not laying out correctly. I am going to switch to the basic layout for a while until I can figure out why it is not behaving correctly.

On the other hand half of my Cheshire Cats were erroneously pulled from Zazzle for copyright infringement. When I questioned it Zazzle informed me it was a mistake and to resubmit the missing designs. So if you are looking for something with that design I should have it back up sometime tomorrow.

Friday, July 10, 2009

What is the motive behind the Cheshire cat's smile?No one may ever know.

I sketched this out two nights ago and last night I duplicated it a few times and added various color combinations. I originally tried to stay away from the purple and pink coloring for I did not want my design to resemble a certain other famous cartoon cat but it went really well with the two other color schemes I chose so I kept it. The best color schemes turned out to be greens, blues and purples. I have to say I had fun drawing this guy. As usual my work seems to be evolving again. I now lean toward pen and ink and while I don't normally use colored pencils I dusted them off for this one. Tonight I plan on adding color to "Unity" or at least I hope to. I am not so sure if that design will lend itself to color, we will have to see. Unity is however now on Greeting Card Universe in a full range of the Pagan holidays

Right now I think I might take an example from my cat and take a nap. I haven't slept well in the past few days (or ever) because of the ideas swimming around in my head, along with daily life issues. Zazzle seems to be moving very slowly today and things are not showing up correctly via outside links.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Well anyone that knows me knows that Samhain and Autumn is my favorite time of the year. I love the colors, the smells and the weather in the Northeast USA. There is simply nothing like it. Samhain is always on my mind, in fact my kitchen is forever decorated in pumpkins, black cats and skeletons even for the other Solstice holidays. Well it is not unusual to see a Samhain/Halloween design come out in the middle of the summer for me (even though summer consists of rain almost everyday here)

I did this design in two versions. The first is done with tiny little dots like my Dual Personality design. The second is in color as you see above and below. This design just kind of popped right out of my head with no thought, the pencil just took hold and took over. This doesn't happen often but I like when it does. I haven't used my watercolors in a while so it was nice to pick up a brush again. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it come to life.